At various points in the manufacture and use of a hard disk drive (HDD), failures or errors can occur that generally require erasure of servo information, and/or user information extant on the recording surfaces of an HDD. For example, during manufacture, errors may occur that render an HDD unusable, but can be corrected, such as spiral write errors. In the servo self-write (SSW) process, an HDD writes servo information (such as product wedges) for each data track of each recording surface of the HDD while servoing on spiral tracks previously written on a surface of the HDD. Errors in the shape or position of these spiral tracks can prevent sufficiently accurate product wedges from being written causing the HDD to fail the SSW process. To rework an HDD that has failed to successfully complete SSW, new spiral tracks typically cannot simply be rewritten onto a surface of the HDD and the SSW process repeated. This is because obsolete spiral tracks and product wedges remaining on one or more recording surfaces of an HDD can be confused with subsequently rewritten spiral tracks, and therefore interfere with the SSW process, even when the new spiral tracks have no errors. Consequently, the recording surfaces of an HDD need to be erased prior to reworking or refurbishing the HDD.
External equipment may be used to thoroughly erase the data recording surfaces of HDDs prior to repeating SSW, such as media bulk erase devices or servo-track writers. For either device, partial disassembly of the HDD to be erased is generally required, necessitating use of a clean room. Furthermore, setup and use of such external equipment for each individual HDD to be erased is time-consuming and expensive in the context of high-volume manufacturing. Alternatively, an HDD can be configured to erase one or more of its own data recording surfaces by controlling write head position with spiral patterns that are written on a different recording surface than the recording surface being erased. However, for an HDD that has only a single recording surface, such an approach is not possible, since there is no other surface on which to write the spiral patterns used to control the erase process. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for systems and methods facilitating in-drive erasure of recording surfaces in a single-surface HDD.